Ohio-based law firm Graham Law was an early adopter of ProLaw, the law practice management and finance software from Elite. It first implemented the solution in the late 1990s. Lawyers, paralegals, administrative, and accounting staff now use ProLaw for a wide range of office requirements, including case management, cost recovery, docketing, and time entry. Today, the firm — which specializes in personal injury and comprises workers’ compensation, disability, criminal defense, and trusts and estates practices — is still finding new ways to use ProLaw to underpin success.

Why Graham Law uses ProLaw

Transparent case management and cohesive functionality are two of the most significant benefits to the firm. "It's our main case management software. Everyone uses it every day: our attorneys, our paralegals, our accountant, our support staff," says Wendy Ashby, Administrative Assistant. She added, “One of the biggest attractions was that the front-office and back-office functionality work together. You don’t need a separate back-office accounting system from the case management side."

Q&A with Wendy Ashby, Administrative Assistant at Graham Law

What was the appeal of ProLaw?

Wendy says, "We could find all of the cases in one place and see what each other were doing. There would be less repetition – everyone could use the same forms and templates, and we’d be able to easily track what was going on in each case. Plus, it would streamline processes."

What are the top 3 aspects of ProLaw for your firm?

According to Wendy, “The case management, time entry, and cost recovery capabilities of ProLaw are extremely important.

“Attorneys like the fact that they can pull up documents quickly and make changes, or if they are new to a case, they can easily see what progress has already happened so far and get up to speed quickly. They can also enter their time as they go along and keep track of their hours on each matter in a straightforward manner.

“When it comes to tracking fees that a department or attorney has brought in, ProLaw makes it easy to retrieve this information. Individuals and the firm can see where we stand against goals for the year and how well we’re recovering costs.”

What else do you like about ProLaw?

Wendy: “In recent years we’ve started to use it more for marketing. For example, we created a custom tab in contacts to store information about how new clients found out about the firm, and the contacts database provides a vital source of information for following up on leads. We’ve built up a lot of client information in ProLaw over the last 25 years, and we want to make use of that data in our marketing.

“Using ProLaw has created efficiencies by removing the duplication of effort and making processes faster. For example, adjusting how expenses or receivables are managed on the accounting side, or eliminating the need to send emails and save documents separately on the case management side because it integrates with Microsoft Outlook and Word and so on. And if an attorney goes to a conference and they learn of a new form, we can put it in ProLaw so everyone can use it."